Thursday, 18 July 2013

Liverpool Care Pathway - The Trouble Bubble Shooter

They are complicit in this "Brutal and callous", mad, insane Pathway. They cannot escape this charge...But they will try.The Brand is all important. Whether that be Marie Curie, We are Macmillan, NHS or...Great Ormond Street.The integrity of the Brand must be preserved, even at the expense of patient safety.

"Over recent years my focus has been on patient safety, explicitly aiming for zero harm, so some mornings I may walk around a few of the wards with my colleagues and together we'll examine various safety aspects. We have recently been awarded Foundation Trust (FT) status, which will allow us to remain a standalone children's hospital. The process required lots of rigorous scrutiny, so it is reassuring to know that we met the regulator's stringent criteria."

Dr Holt found herself caught in a firestorm after Great Ormond Street took over the community health service in Haringey. She became a whistleblower, she says, because she feared something terrible would happen to a child and was devastated when the warnings went unheeded.

The country's best-known children's hospital imposed a gagging order on one of Britain's leading doctors after she raised concerns about patient safety, triggering rows with managers which led to her departure, it has emerged.Great Ormond Street Hospital used a confidentiality agreement with Dr Hilary Cass, the leader of the NHS's 11,000 specialists in child health, to settle a long-running dispute with her which saw her demoted in the wake of warning the London hospital's bosses that inadequate staffing was putting patients' safety at risk.The disclosure has raised fresh worries about the NHS's controversial use of gagging orders to stop staff from drawing attention to issues which they fear are compromising patient care and safety. The health minister, Dr Dan Poulter, earlier this week condemned a culture in the NHS in which he said "again and again, a desire not to face up to the reality of poor care saw institutional secrecy put ahead of patient safety".

AFTER finally issuing an apology to whistleblower Dr Kim Holt last month, Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH – a foundation trust-in-waiting) and its Teflon-coated CEO Dr Jane Collins were doubtless hoping to draw a line under Baby P. But Lynne Featherstone MP is now calling for an investigation into Collins’ actions in withholding vital information – the Sibert report – from the original serious case review into the death of baby Peter Connelly. Collins says this was on legal advice and her board is backing her.

The hospital has friends in high places: Ivan Cameron, the prime minister’s severely disabled son, was treated at GOSH; and its charity is wooing Samantha Cameron as a patron. Collins, who removed herself from the General Medical Council (GMC) register and can’t be referred over Baby P’s death, has survived persistent calls for a public inquiry and a vote of no-confidence from 50 consultants last year. But she needs to be held accountable for the audit trail of suppression that has protected one of Britain’s most cherished hospitals and deflected the blame for Baby P’s death disproportionately on to substandard social services and one underqualified consultant, Dr Sabah Al-Zayyat, who missed the child abuse.The Sibert report makes it clear three times in bold that “This information was not in the St Ann’s notes.” This was hardly what Collins wanted to hear, as she could no longer blame Baby P’s death on one doctor –who made serious clinical errors - when there was also a convincing written audit trail implicating GOSH and her leadership.

So what did Collins do? She tried to manage the problem. Immediately after Baby P’s death, Kim Holt was offered a year’s salary in November 2007 to leave. In December 2008, when Baby P’s death had become a tabloid sensation, Dr Holt was offered £120,000 to sign a compromise agreement with a “supergag” clause. But there was one catch. Lawyers for Great Ormond Street, Beachcroft, wrote to Dr Holt claiming: “Our client is not aware that Dr Holt has ever raised concerns over the management of child protection issues.” This one sentence sought to rewrite the audit trail and ensure GOSH could escape blame. The offer of £120,000 was then made expresslysubject to these allegations being withdrawn. Kim Holt bravely refused.

GOSH also failed to tell the Treasury that the £120,000 pay-off, at taxpayers’ expense, would be tied to a silencing agreement. Faced with Dr Holt sticking to her principles, the strategic health authority sprang into action. NHS London spent £103,000 on a report from a firm of solicitors, which appears to exonerate NHS managers. GOSH spent £286,797.41 on Verita management consultants who also seemed to find no fault with management (and did not even interview the four consultants who signed the 2006 letter).Dr Holt, meanwhile, remained on special leave at a cost of £95,000 a year, and GOSH had spent £82,218 on legal advice to date in her case. All of this is taxpayers’ money. No manager has faced any sanction as a result of their failings in running the child protection clinic.

She is the Terminator. Her name: Dr. Jane Collins.She is the Terminator. And she is back...

"I'll never get those lost years back. Four years of my family's life disrupted, and my career threatened. They tried to push me out simply because I told the truth. It was all about protecting the name and reputation of the Great Ormond Street brand. I was called dishonest, but my first duty as a doctor is to my patients, not my employers." - Dr. Holt

Public funds squandered in attempts to bury the truth!These people are used to dipping their hands into others' pockets.Dr. Collins was appointed as CEO of Marie Curie last year.Dr. Collins will be busy about burying the culpability of Marie Curie in this Scandal that is the Liverpool Care Pathway...Thus does Charity hang her head in shame.

About Me

I am distraught and I despair that these events have befallen this family. The picture is of me and my lovely mum, murdered on the NHS (National-socialist Health Service). Murdered. Is that too strong a word? Her life was taken without her permission. By omission and by commission, actions taken and not taken conspired to end her life. She was kept in ignorance of what was proceeding before her very eyes, as were we. Was she, then, not murdered?